This is a love story. It gets delightfully raunchy in the last third for those of you who would rather skip ahead.
"Hi, Jim, this is Mary. I really feel bad about this but I'm not going to be able to come down for the weekend like we planned. I'm way behind on a couple of term papers and exams are coming up and I'm in a total panic."
"Maybe you could come anyway and study here? I've got tickets for the concerts and the dances but you could just study during the day and well..."
"No, I don't think so. I know I'd be too tempted to goof off."
"Well, okay, I guess I understand; I'm disappointed but I guess you have to do what you have to do."
"Thanks! I knew you'd be sweet about it."
Well fuck! Not only was this one of the biggest weekends of the school year, Spring Fest, but it was always the most fun since the weather was usually warm. Everybody would have a date; it was unlikely that he would be able to find one in a little over a week.
If he'd had to do it over again, he would never had chosen an all male university in spite of its status as a top school. There were a number of all girl colleges in a perimeter of fifty to a hundred miles from the University. When he had been a freshman, there had been a requirement to live in the dorm and personal cars were not allowed. The only way you could meet girls was either as part of a school sponsored mixer with one of the female schools or if you got lucky and made friends with an upper classman who had a car.
He had joined a fraternity with the hope of establishing a relationship with someone with a car but most of the brothers in his house were ass holes who got a sadistic pleasure in fucking with under classmen. One had even gotten his girl friend to bring some young ladies to the University one weekend and pawned them off on the pledges. They were all decidedly unattractive, almost intentionally so; he had been polite and pleasant but the weekend 'date' had been dismal.
The summer after his first year, an old friend of his mom's who owned a farm barely twenty minutes from campus had offered to let him board in one of the cottages on her farm in exchange for minor chores. Hattie was getting on in years and really just felt safer having a young man around for security. His chores were minimal; he chopped firewood and kept her fireplace bin well stocked. He fed her few remaining horses. He'd use her old tractor to plow her garden in the spring and remove the snow in the winter. Having grown up on a farm, he was not unaccustomed to farm work and what Hattie expected was not remotely intrusive. He joined her for dinner one night a week and found the old girl to be a fascinating person with a sharp wit and a delightful litany of stories.
Living on Aunt Hattie's farm---he called her aunt even though there was no blood relationship---also enabled him to apply for in state tuition which saved a ton of money. It also gave him the right to a "local" automobile registration which had fewer restrictions than the typical sophomore one.
He had a scholarship which only paid the in state fees, not the out of state penalty. Aunt Hattie wasn't charging him any money for the lodging; as far as utilities, he only paid for his long distance phone calls. He'd made enough money over the summer to buy a reliable car, a reasonably late model VW bug. He also had purchased a used motor bike, a small Honda, which he often rode to class because he could park much closer to the academic buildings.
The University had a lot of guys from wealthy families with fancy cars and a pocket full of coin. Jim was not one of those; his step dad was a school teacher who also ran a marginal small farm; his mother had been elected justice of the peace and made a little money working out of her home, 'court room' in their small, very rural, northeastern Pennsylvania locale and also had some insurance from when his dad had been killed. Jim had been fortunate to have scored very well on the SATs and had a perfect high school record. An education from a top of the line, edge of the Ivy League school would provide him a leg up when it came to a career.
Jim's father had died in an auto accident when Jim had been nine; Jim had not known about the small trust fund his father had established for his education; in point of fact, his mom had not even known, until Jim's godfather had made them aware. It was not a lot of money; Jim's dad had left $28,000 in a tightly constructed trust which would pay out a yearly stipend, basically the interest, as long as he was in school. The fund had grown modestly over ten years as it had been invested very conservatively and now paid out four to five thousand dollars a year which came in a monthly check. At twenty-five, Jim would have access to the principle.
Jim worked part time as a photo-journalist for the local daily paper during the school year and full time in the summer. He had always had a gift for writing and had often written articles and taken photos for the small weekly paper in his high school town. He also knew how to process film and print photos; he had operated an engraving machine exactly like the models they had. The managing editor of the local daily had hired him on the spot when he discovered that he would require no real training. During the school year, Jim worked a night shift at the paper, to include local photo and news assignments. During the intervals when prints were drying, film was fixing or plastic photo engravings were grinding away on one of the two Fairchild machines, Jim would study.
Five days a week, he would call his editor, and get his photo and short news story assignments, which were usually covered between 4:00 PM and 9:00 PM. The paper also paid him mileage. After he was done with his assignments, he'd let himself into the newspaper building and see what his boss had left him. He'd develop film, select the best photos and then print and engrave them for the following day's edition. He'd write up his own copy, print and engrave any ad work that had been left in his bin, edit some of the copy from the less detail oriented reporters, transmit a few wire photos, clean up the photo/engraving lab and occasionally print off some of his own personal work which would often be published in a full page feature spread once a month.
The management loved him and loved his work and made it clear that he had a career with them should he want one. He'd normally log a forty hour week at the paper; during the summer he'd often log almost twice as much as vacations strained the already small staff. Regular pay was two and a half times the current minimum wage; everything between forty and fifty hours was at time and a half and over fifty hours was double. It was not a union job but management paid along union standards to keep the union out.
He loved the job; for Jim it was not remotely work compared to the arduous physical labor he had done growing up on a working farm or the crappy sales clerk jobs he had taken during his first semester in college. Additionally, while some might have found the lab work boring, that is, waiting for a process to be completed, for him it was almost like a forced study hall and he would generally get in several hours of good study time.
Jim's parents had instilled in him a strong work ethic; his step father had been almost obsessively organized. It had been a real pain in the ass for Jim when he had been a teen, but now it paid real dividends. Most students at this University despised early morning classes; as a result, most of those classes had much more favorable professor/student ratios---even more so since a lot of people cut early classes under the University's liberal class cutting policy.
Jim rose early, performed his chores for Hattie and was in class by 8:00 AM. With an eighteen semester hour load, he was done by eleven or twelve. He'd grab a sandwich and head to the massive library to do any required research. He'd be back home by 2:00 PM and catch a couple of hours of sleep before calling in for his assignments. From 4:00 PM to midnight, he was on the clock for the newspaper. He'd often catch a beer at a local road house on the way home, generally in the vain hope of finding some female companionship but that never really panned out.
